HubMP2012

A catalogue of Tory disasters – but how much is changing under Labour?

 October 2, 2025

Mike Phipps reviews What Went Wrong with Britain?: An Audit of Tory Failure, edited by Steven Kettell, Peter Kerr and Daniela Tepe, published by Manchester University Press.

The sense of frustration and despair about the state of modern Britain shared among the editors of this book was such that they originally thought of calling it WTF is Wrong with Britain? The publisher persuaded them otherwise, but the premise retains its urgency.

Everything you would expect is here and quite a bit more. Matthew Watson charts the collapse of the Conservative Party – under Johnson of course, but also his successors – into populist crowing about British exceptionalism to mask governmental  incompetence, most infamously during the Covid pandemic.

James Morrison catalogues the years of denial about the UK’s structural and ever-widening levels of inequality, rooted in “moralising neoliberal narratives that individualise responsibility for poverty.” Claire Thompson, Dianna Smith and Laura Hamilton highlight Britain’s food poverty – among the worst in Europe.

The chapter on the NHS is particularly telling.  Allyson Pollock, James Lancater and Louisa Harding-Edgar highlight how the Covid-19 Inquiry showed how services for managing communicable diseases were undermined by the abolition of the Public Health Laboratory Service, a loss of public health expertise and the fragmentation and part-privatisation of services. The closure of 100,000 beds in the last fifteen years alone, leaving the NHS with a quarter of the number it had when it was founded, meant the service was completely unprepared when Covid hit. This led to the Government spending £220 million on Nightingale hospitals and awarding contracts worth £2 billion to private healthcare companies.

Neil Carter examines years of dismal under-achievement on climate policy. Leaving aside the unexpected improvement in air quality resulting from Covid lockdowns and the more long-term benefits of increased working from home, the issue has been largely neglected by successive Tory governments reeling from one crisis to the next.  The author describes their approach to energy efficiency in buildings, for example, as “calamitous”. At the root of the failures was a reliance on market-led solutions and the influence on policy of corporate interests.

Johnna Montgomerie argues that the politics of debt is a key aspect of the neoliberal state. As the 2008 crisis showed, when markets panic, the state uses public debt freely to restore ‘confidence’, whereupon financial institutions use their new liquidity to pass on debt to private households. Global asset markets benefit at the expense of the rest of us and the crisis continues, fuelled  – as other authors argue here -by worsening inequality.

It should not be forgotten that there was real opposition to this catalogue of disasters. David J. Bailey reminds  us of the anti-fees protests, the direct action of UK Uncut, the growth of independent unions, anti-fracking protests, civil liberties and rent campaigns – movements which fed into the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership.

The book covers the impact on women and minoritised communities. Yet there are also some curious omissions: nothing on Britian’s failing education system or the impact of national decline on young people.

Can Labour do better?

It may have been too early, when this book went to press, to speculate whether the incoming Labour government could turn the tide, but most contributors were not optimistic. Here are Frankie Rogan and Emma Foster who wrote a chapter on gender relations: “The inability of Starmer’s Labour to produce even the illusion of sustained hope and optimism in the UK is indicative of the long-standing consequences of austerity and permacrisis, and the inability of most politicians to imagine a world beyond it.”

The authors of the chapter on health agree: “The incoming Labour government has given us little cause for hope.” Likewise on social care, Juanita Elias, Ruth Pearson and Shirin M. Rai doubt whether the new Labour government have either “the capacity or willingness [to] bring about significant reforms to the sector that might end decades of policy drift.”

Most alarmingly, the author of the chapter on debt believes that the incoming Labour government has no coherent economic plan or strategy, adding, with some foresight: “Starmer and the new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will repackage austerity measures and urgent and necessary interventions to the large public debt caused by austerity – a circular argument.”

The Government’s defenders would refute these interim verdicts. They would point to some significant successes: the Employment Rights Bill, the return of the railways to public ownership, private schools now paying VAT on fees, free school meals for 500,000 more children and increased NHS spending.

But it’s the big stuff on which the Government is failing and which explains its dire poll ratings.  A recent poll placed Keir Starmer as the most unpopular Prime Minister in history, with a lower approval rating than even Liz Truss. It’s not just that he has failed to spell out a coherent vision: just 16% of people polled by YouGov think Labour have a clear sense of purpose.

It’s working within a self-imposed fiscal straitjacket, which has resulted in some deeply unpopular policy choices – from the winter fuel payments fiasco, through a refusal to abolish the two child-benefit cap, despite clear evidence that doing so is an easy way to reduce child poverty, to disability benefit cuts.

In their zeal to reassure investors and the bond market, Starmer and Reeves seem “prepared to hurt poorer people while apparently leaving the wealthy largely untouched,” noted one commentator recently.

Meanwhile, too many people still feel squeezed by soaring energy bills, supermarket price gouging and housing costs. The Chancellor’s tax and spend plans look like tinkering, rather than the radical change promised, and with no bold moves on wealth taxes, amid rising inequality and patchy growth, her whole approach smacks of maintaining managed decline. The complacent reliance on ‘market-led solutions’ to the housing crisis, the problems engulfing the NHS and even natural monopolies like the water industry underline that this Government, like its predecessors, is putting failed ideology before practical solutions.

These are deep-rooted failings, not just weaknesses in messaging or spin. If Keir Starmer does not change course, inexorable pressure will mount on his leadership -sooner than many might imagine.

Such scenarios are beyond the scope of this book, whose great strength is in charting how we got here. But, despite last year’s election promises, there’s little sign that Starmer’s leadership is going to get us out of this mess.